Gina Gershon Ghost Story

It happened when I was in college over at NYU. If you weren’t living in the dorms you were always looking for cheap apartments. I was living with a friend of mine and she said that she had found this amazing place and they needed four girls to live in this one house. The whole place when you walked into the apartment to begin with, it looked elaborate and you had to walk up these stairs. When you went into the apartment it almost seemed like it was a theatre. There was the living room that was almost a stage, with weird paintings on it. I guess it had been there since the turn of the century. Because I didn’t know everyone I wanted to be separate from everyone else, so I took the loser room, because it was like a little closet basically. It really wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It fit my bed and my chest of drawers and that was about it. But it was separated from the rest of the girls.

There wasn’t any source of light. No windows. So i was definitely isolated from the rest of the girls. I started noticing at night that I was having these fitful sleeps. I kept having violent nightmares in there. I don’t remember what they were but it was very intense sleeping in there. There were nights I would go to sleep and I would literally wake up and I’d have scratches on my body and some bruises. I mean, I’ve never really had scratches or bruises in my sleep before. I remember one time when my boyfriend slept over I asked him what he was doing. If he was scratching me in the night. He then started having crazy dreams. There was definitely this very violent energy in my room in particular.

As I started working and I was writing my papers, I would be alone in the house. A lot of the time I would be doing my term papers and I wouldn’t win a lot of clothes and I could feel this presence there. I could almost see it. He was a little bit heavy set and really pasty. He was always in his underwear, like funny weird men shorts. He didn’t have much hair, if not bald. He just had a kind of a slack jaw. He would just stare at you and just watch every move. I could feel him standing next to me and just staring at me. At night time I think he would hassle me at night or something. One night when my room-mate and her boyfriend where in my bedroom using it, they came out of the bed and they were really freaked out. They said I had to go see because it was so weird. I went into the bedroom and in the closet there was a light that was flickering on and off. Like a really strange light and there was no way this light could get in there. My friend Jason was really sceptical. He was trying to figure it out and I said ‘Jason that’s the ghost. I keep telling you guys there’s a ghost. That’s him’ Over a period of time everything started going strange. There was a weird environment in the house. I started getting more and more scratches and I told my friend that we have to go.

So we took off and found another place. About a couple of months later we were talking at the dinner table with some people I’ve never really met and I told them about the apartment. When I mentioned it was pink, the guy said “The pink place?” He seemed to know exactly the apartment I was living in. I said, yes that’s the place, do you know it, did you live there? He said that he didn’t live there but it’s a known place. He knew about it because it was once a brothel at the turn of the century. I said, really? It felt so garish and it was so elaborate. He said it ended tragically because the madam who lived there had a son who had something wrong with him mentally and he killed two of the prostitutes. That must have been the guy. Clearly, my ghost was this guy. When I found out the truth of who the ghost was I got the chills because all of a sudden everything made sense. I guess he kept coming back to the home that he knew, where he felt comfortable.